How the word counter works
Words are counted by splitting your text on whitespace, so contractions and hyphenated words each count as one word. Characters include every letter, number, punctuation mark and space you've typed. Sentences are estimated by counting the periods, question marks and exclamation points that end a chunk of text.
Reading time is estimated at 200 words per minute, the average adult silent reading speed, so you can gauge how long an article, essay or email will take a reader to get through.